http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
THIS country has been at war since September 11, 2001 --- not by its own
Choice, but by an act of terror unmatched in our history. The peace was
broken not early yesterday morning by Allied missiles and aircraft over
the mountains and valleys of distant Afghanistan, but by the searing
images of great towers aflame and crumbling in a great city.

Since the morning of September 11, 2001, a state of war has existed
between the United States of America and a shadowy network of terrorists
with roots in their host countries. Now the war has come to them.

This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. It is not
even the end of the beginning. It is only the start, the first hours, of
what will be a long, often hidden struggle to rid the world of those who
thought they could frighten and divide us.

They may have hoped that we would bury our dead and go on about our
business, open to the next attack and the next. They miscalculated.

A great array of nations now has been assembled and has only begun to
pursue them to the ends of the earth, and to the end of their wretched
lives.

During the weeks since September 11th and a crime so awful no word has
proven adequate to capture it, we have buried our dead, succoured the
survivors, sent help and lined up to give our blood, and most of all waited.
.

We have been waiting for the beginning. And now it has come.

During all those weeks, the faces of the dead have been before us--- the
grief of those they leave behind, at funerals and memorial services, and on
forlorn cards and posters flapping in the wind on bulletin boards and
telephone poles in lower Manhattan. We have seen the long parade of victims,
many of whose bodies lie beyond recovery.

But we have also seen a parade of heroes. The police and firemen, the
emergency workers and rescue teams from all over the country, the doctors
and nurses and volunteers from all stations of life who rallied instantly,
and who go on doing what they can do, giving all they have.

Now we are about to see a new wave of heroes, wave after wave of
them, the airmen and sailors, the special forces and mountain troops,
and all those who will support them without wavering.

Many of those heroes, fighting a covert war, will never be seen, but the
enemy will feel their blows soon enough. And know who delivered them ---
free people not limited but invigorated by its freedoms.

During all these weeks, what may have been most impressive has been the
patience of a notoriously impatient people. The immediate rage after
September 11th has been tempered into resolve.

A frontier people raised with the ethos of frontier justice -- quick and
Brutal -- has waited patiently while allies and even erstwhile adversaries were
consulted and recruited, and all the chess pieces put in place for the
opening.

There were remarkably few demands heard for action now, no matter how
imprecise and ineffective. The maturity of the American people has seldom
been so impressive.

Americans soon grasped that this was a different kind of war against a
different kind of enemy, and that our retribution would best be served
stone cold.

These first raids against the enemy --- central nervous system are but a
foretaste of what is to come. Thanks to the patience of a people not known
for that quality, our response will come at times and places of our
choosing, not the enemy.

War is a natural nursery of illusions, both ecstatic and despairing. The
first reports of success against the enemy will be matched and raised by
stories planted in the media to discourage and dismay us.

The crucial battlefield in this struggle, as it has been in so many
American wars, will be the battle for public opinion.

If the great advantage of Americans in this conflict is a technical and
human competence, this hidden enemy is counting on our national reputation
for impatience, and the divisions and defeatism it may prompt.

Even now, somewhere in their holes, our enemies must speculate about how
long it will take to crack the American will, or to divert it into the
usual, divisive quarrels.

In this, too, they will have miscalculated. For September 11th has united
us as seldom before.

If the Taliban and their terrorist allies are to be bombarded by missiles
and smart bombs, and assaulted by Afghans at home and special forces
flown in from the rest of the world, Americans may soon be attacked around
the clock, too --- by speculation, rumor, and propaganda designed to divide us.
Information true and false, reliable and un-, speculative and solid, is
now about to rain down on the American public like so much chaff, and it
will not be easy to carefully, patiently find the wheat.

The public consciousness will be saturated, the political circuits
overloaded, and a surfeit of reports may undermine confidence in all
reports, even useful ones. The fog of war is about to descend, and patience,
judgment, and forbearance will be needed more than ever.

This is Osama bin Laden's secret weapon. Not his suicide bombers or
his insane hopes of staging a biological or nuclear attack, but the
fickleness of American public opinion. Those who hate us for our freedom
will do whatever they can to use it against us, and turn us against one
another. They will fail. Because they have mistaken our freedom for
disunity, our great strength for weakness. As they are about to
discover.